It’s been a mixed bag of shows in Melbourne for the beginning of 2014. Have to admit I haven’t come away from the theatre feeling elated yet. I have, on the other hand, had to deal with some motion sickness.

The MTC 2014 season has opened with a production of Noel Coward’s 1930 play ‘Private Lives’, and whilst there are some things to like about this show, I found myself wondering whether it was still earning its place on the theatre mainstage in the twenty-first century.

The first half of this MTC production, directed by Sam Strong, is dominated by a complex revolving set which moves so fast and so often I felt a bit giddy at times (lord knows how the actors were coping). One side is the interior of a hotel in the French seaside town of Deauville, the other a pair of hotel balconies on which much of the action takes place. In adjoining rooms are newlyweds Elyot-and-Sybil and Amanda-and-Victor, who spend an awful lot of time bantering about the earlier failed marriage of Amanda and Elyot. When the former couple spy each other on their respective balconies, they realise they’re still in love and decide to abandon their new spouses and run away to Paris together.

This comedy of manners is replete with witticisms, but almost a century after the play first hit the stage, much of the dialogue feels archaic and, to be honest, trivial. There is a momentary interest in observing the lives of the idol rich in Europe, people whose most taxing decisions appear to be about whether to have champagne or a martini before din-dins, but after a while I stopped caring. And the cavalier conversations about domestic violence (Elyot and Amanda like a bit of fisticuffs) were full of terrible clangers, seen from a twenty-first century perspective.

Most annoying, however, was the interpolation of dodgy contemporary pop songs in the musical accompaniment to the show. Watching Amanda (Nadine Garner) doing a frantic foxtrot to a Michael Jackson song was deeply discomforting.

Leon Ford as Elyot Chase was the strongest cast member, finding a balance between the inevitable archness of Coward’s character sketches and the stereotype of the uptight Englishman. And Julie Forsyth’s beautiful clowning as the French maid Louise was a highlight of this production. I’ve never seen Gallic contempt portrayed with such deftness and so many pratfalls. Lucy Durack (Sybil Chase) is a music theatre performer and employed an acting style more appropriate for that theatrical form than for farce.

I dunno. There was plenty of laughter coming from the rest of the audience, so maybe I’m the lone curmudgeon here. Froth and bubbles just doesn’t seem that relevant to me in the theatre these days.

‘Private Lives’ is on at the MTC’s Sumner Theatre in Southbank until March 8th.

At the Arts Centre this week I saw the Diavolo dance company from Los Angeles perform ‘Architecture in Motion’, consisting of two works – Transit Space and Trajectoire. Directed by French choreographer Jacques Heim, the company employs a range of acrobatic, gymnastic and circus manoeuvres as muscular additions to a more traditional ‘contemporary’ dance language.

Transit Space borrows from the competitive masculine cultures of skateboarding and hip hop and is set on and around a series of slides styled on the ramps you might find in a skate park. The dancers leap and strut in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of movement as they push the giant silver slides around the stage. It looks dangerous, and perhaps it is, although the performers also look astonishingly comfortable as they defy gravity over and over. At times you feel like you could be watching a break-dancing competition, and at other times you could be inside a Cirque de Soleil tent. At all times, though, the athleticism is overlaid by a physical grace that gives the work an assured artistic depth.

In Trajectoire the set is once again a central focus of the performance. The dancers move under, over and around a giant rocking ship-like structure, negotiating the ever-changing balance of this contraption with brilliant timing and immense physical strength. At times I had to fight off a slight sensation of motion sickness just watching them, so who knows how the dancers themselves cope with the earth moving constantly under their feet. I was full of admiration for the dancers and the imaginative choreography in this work.

On the other hand, the sound design in this show leaves a bit to be desired. In Transit Space there is a way-too-loud and at times rather trite recorded commentary over the top of a way-too-loud and slightly bombastic musical accompaniment. The aphoristic commentary on the Alienation of our Modern Lifestyles is completely unnecessary, and distracts us from what the very clear dance language is trying to communicate. And in Trajectoire, once again the music slips over into Cirque de Soleil-style bombast a few too many times, trying to TELL US how we should be feeling. Less is more…

But I’m happy to recommend this production to anyone interested in the beauty and courage of the human body. Diavolo perform at the Arts Centre until February 9th.

And finally, last night I saw ‘Evolution Revolution and the Mail Order Bride’ at the Fortyfivedownstairs theatre in Flinders Lane. This production is written and performed by Zulya Kamalova, a Tartarstani-Australian singer-songwriter who is best known for her work with the band The Children of the Underground.

Kamalova worked with director Maude Davey to create this work whose premise, according to the writer, ‘is that the suppression of the Feminine leads to crisis – political, environmental, social or moral’. Kamalova plays three characters – Inessa Armand, a Soviet Russian revolutionary feminist; Eva, a Russian mail-order bride who marries an older Australian man; and Maya, a ‘wild shaman woman’.

The three characters’ stories are interwoven and performed around a deliberately shambolic set in which domestic objects are piled up at the back of the stage, and the performance is accompanied by a quartet of extraordinarily talented multi-instrumentalists including violinist and composer Errki Veltheim, cellist Charlotte Jacke, brass player Donald Stewart and keyboard player Justin Marshall.

Kamalova is a charismatic performer with a pure, flexible voice capable of carrying off practically any musical style. Her first major outing as an actor, however, was a little tentative at times, leading to a few moments of low energy and flagging audience attention. The most successful character was Eva the mail-order bride, a strutting, pouting, vulnerable blonde who is barely resigned to her status as a sexual object. At times, though, the ‘message’ being conveyed about women’s powerlessness tended to swerve from mild didacticism to obscure mysticism.

I suspect Kamalova’s performances will grow in confidence as the season progresses. It is a brave and admirable professional move from one of this country’s most talented musical performers.

‘Evolution Revolution…’ is on at Fortyfivedownstairs until February 16th.